Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1

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On Character and Desire / Diana Svennes-Smith

Keywords: Literature; Communication; Linguistics & Semiotics 

<1> Last night I was looking out the window at the growing dusk and thinking about what a friend had said when I confided in him my struggles with character development: “The critics couldn‘t do what you are doing in your novel.” For the briefest instant the idea that I do know something about writing character flooded through me until I internalized it and the idea became belief. And then it was gone.

<2> But this is not about my lack of confidence, at least not directly. This is about my ideas regarding character and desire. Okay, I have a character. How do I start? I start with a sentence, a character in a sentence. The sentence comes with a certain rhythm, a feeling, somewhat remote. What about character though? I believe characters come fully formed. The first time I really felt this was in a story I once read where the character, a young boy, emerged fully formed, wanting to respect his father, to believe him worthy of respect despite evidence to the contrary. I truly felt this boy‘s pain when his father was forcing him to choose “my crooked path or the straight and narrow highway.” A moral dilemma. Is that the same as desire? He wanted so badly to please his father and would get punished if he didn‘t, but contrary to pleasing his father, he also wanted his father not to do the wrong that he always did. So, the boy embodied two desires in opposition. His was also a coming-of-age story. Does desire enter into that rite of passage?

<3> This is a significant question relating to my novel‘s theme of a girl coming of age. The boy didn‘t consciously want to grow up, so perhaps desire doesn‘t enter into it on a conscious level. Growing up is a byproduct of making the right choice, the moral choice, of wanting to be moral.

<4> I remember another character that fascinated me with her complexity. A teacher, she wanted not to be anonymous in the lives of her students. But she also wanted to be anonymous. She wanted to be alone and hate them. I thought I could learn from her, and from the boy in the other story, about how to create complex, evocative characters in my own fiction. But I soon found that whatever magic brought them to life for me was not transferable. I have to try to think for myself about what I believe about character. It‘s hard to think for oneself. I feel like that means I have to come up with an original idea about character and desire—an idea that has never been thought about before—but perhaps it only means that of all I know and have been told, what do I agree with? What are my own observations, my own creative impulses? Here my confidence problem shows. I seem to be under the apprehension that my natural impulses are rudimentary at best, and wrong at worst.

<5> What I don‘t understand is how a character can be developed. What is the process of writing? It‘s just writing down what is, the way it comes through your mind onto the page. If you stop to ’develop character,” to ask what the character wants, that pause interrupts the transmission and it stops being real and true and starts becoming bad fiction. What I need to get good at is getting out of the way. I find that when I can get my own intentions out of the way and let the characters live and move within their setting, that‘s when the truth of the story can come through and it is often much better writing than I can contrive. In such moments I wonder where the writing came from because it feels nothing like my own hobbled attempts. When I am not in that zone where I have entered the world of the characters, the writing becomes labored. I have to ask then: what should my character do next? What does my character want? And I don‘t know. And I get stuck. And it‘s damned painful.

<6> I have an overall vision for my novel. I have all the chapters plotted and I know the major event of each chapter. I know what everything is supposed to be moving toward. And I‘m slowly but surely getting all the chapters written so that the major event comes into being and the plot moves toward the projected end where my protagonist is reunited with her mother, wanting nothing but to be her child again because she‘s had some trauma now and understands her own fallibility and her mortality, and that‘s what has pushed her into adult awareness enough to know that she doesn‘t want it after all—she thought she did but now that she‘s got it she knows she‘s not ready—but then her mother rejects her in that moment when she‘s ready to come back. The mother doesn‘t let her in. So my protagonist is cast out of the garden in that moment. That‘s what the novel is supposed to be moving toward. That moment.

<7> And what I thought should be occurring chapter by chapter to make that moment feel like the climax of a steady build of my protagonist‘s arc isn‘t happening. When I look back on the chapters I‘ve written, I don‘t see this arc being incrementally created, chapter by chapter. What I see, in the best scenes, is characters responding to their moment, or not. When they‘re not responding to anything, the setting becomes the character for the time being. It becomes charged with the emotions of the character who is for the moment seemingly passive and unresponsive. I think it is in those moments where the environment takes on life as a projection of the characters‘ inner lives that my best writing occurs. When I start to ask what my character wants, the writing gets wooden and I make my characters go through their motions acting out what I think they want and what they‘re supposed to do about it, like puppets on a static stage. No! It‘s not right! The setting is not static. The setting colludes, the setting becomes a metaphor, shifting and changing with every nuance of the character‘s thoughts and feelings and actions. The character doesn‘t even have to do anything for us to know character if the setting is an aural extension of character.

<8> When I tried to look at that complex teacher character with the idea of learning how to give my own character such complexity, I was soon over my head in a quagmire of conflicting desires, each thread spiraling out to ever greater contradictions and paradoxes. To answer the question “What does that character desire?” was next to impossible. She wanted to connect with her students, but she wanted to be alone so she could hate them. She wanted companionship and sex but they became dead to her. She wanted her baby but she didn‘t want babies. One might be better off asking what she wanted at a certain minute in the story, but not by much because each moment contained ambiguity. I drew the conclusion that opposition is the nature of desire and tried developing my novel character using principles of duality, but soon had her flip-flopping back and forth between her desire to grow up and her desire to stay a child. When you reduce things to their binaries, there is tension but oversimplification as well. And that is where I have trouble applying any sort of answer to the question: What does my character want? To answer that is to reduce the infinite complexity of a human being to the simplicity of a linguistic answer. You cannot state the unsayable. You can only suggest, try to hint at it, show it, approximate it using every tool you‘ve got. And now that I have said this, I realize that not only setting colludes, but language and rhythm and tone and mood and pace. In short, everything. Every single tool you‘ve got.

<9> I have been feeling that since I couldn‘t ever answer the question, “What does your character want?” that my skill was lacking and I had a lot to learn. But really, everything I need to know is already inside me if I will only trust my own experience. Writing to me is not so much a craft as an art, a mystical experience in which the boundaries of time and space are . . . I almost said “transcended” but that‘s too pretentious and grand a word. It suggests that we writer-gods have some special ticket to the heavenly realms mere mortals can never possess.

<10> What I want to say is rather that the experience of creation takes us outside of what is already here. We have to go to the source to get the new material to create new things. And the source is where all the new things are made. They don‘t exist in this dimension. We have to leave this dimension and bring them back. So, what does my character want? I don‘t know because I‘m not her. She acts on her own behalf and her desires are closed to me.

<11> But is that true? No. As I am creating characters, or bringing them into creation, I do know what is in their hearts and minds. And, much as I wish I could keep this discussion simple, I must complicate it further by saying that I collude in their making. It‘s like I‘m following a character along, writing what they are doing and seeing and thinking and feeling, sometimes overtly, sometimes through setting, and then I catch up and start to prod them a little to keep going. Prompt is a better word. They slow down and I prompt them with a suggestion of what I imagine they might feel and think and do. And then they‘re off again and I‘m writing just a little behind them as they come into being already in motion, like in each moment they are not there until they are, and then they‘re not there in the next moment and then they are. If they stop moving they die because they only exist on the page as a character moving into the next moment that is written about them.

<12> So, characters seem to be their own creatures that I‘m bringing forth from other dimensions or from the source where all the material for creation comes from, but is this a pretentious lie, too? Am I not being fanciful about the making of art? Am I not really just dredging up my own inner world and smearing it across the page? Why do I feel that characters come from somewhere not only outside myself but outside of the known world? When I prompt them, aren‘t I in fact quite consciously adding to their character, deliberately assigning a thought, feeling, or action to keep the story going? Why do so many writers who have written about their process state that they have the experience of chasing after their characters trying to record what they‘re acting out before they get too far ahead? I hate asking these kinds of questions because I fear they lead me into that daunting territory of the subconscious, a landscape I know nothing about.

<13> So, how to avoid talking about the creation of character without addressing the nature of the unconscious? Can I stay tethered to a discussion of what‘s going on in the story and how the elements collude to create character? Can I even explain this complex collusion that I insist gives rise to characters that are larger than language can express? How to talk about character when it‘s precisely because language simplifies that we need to employ everything else? But aren‘t they also created by language? Can language actually create feelings and moods and rhythms and tensions and atmosphere and motion and aura and all that? It does, of course it does, because that‘s writing—words set on paper. How can words make such complex feeling? How can words morph into vivid living beings called characters? Do I have to talk about words when I talk about character construction? Characters are made of words. Can I avoid this at all?

<14> Character desires, but what? Perhaps the question is more applicable to revision than creation. In revision we can see the story as a whole at last, where when the writing is going well, we are hyperaware of the moment and cannot possibly be at the same time generally aware of the whole. So, to understand character desire we must reflect upon the whole in the objective coolness of one who has come through the fire and looks back on it from a safe distance. You can‘t stop while it‘s hot. You‘ve got to keep running. So after the running along behind the character through the fire is over, you can stop and turn around and ask that question of your character: What did you want? Then you can see if that motivation is transparent enough, or if the internal logic is weak. Then you can chink up the holes where anything is wobbly and unstable. So, that question, “What do you desire?” is not a fair question to put to a character in the process of emerging. But it is a fair question to ask after the character is.

<15> And there is talk of round characters and flat characters and main characters and counterpoint characters and so on, but I wonder if it‘s any business of the writer what kind of character it is. I wonder if that‘s more the business of the critic. I can‘t imagine introducing a new character with an awareness of him or her being flat or round. I might think I know at this point whether they will have a fleeting moment in the story or a lengthy involvement, but they are not flat or round to me as a consequence, and I don‘t reflect much on their role. They simply come in when they are needed and stay in the background when they are not needed. I have a sense that the boy I have introduced in my story is some kind of counterpoint to my female protagonist (now I‘m contradicting myself, but I didn‘t introduce him as such—it was only after I stopped and thought about him that I stuck a label on him) and that she is the main character, but he has insisted on a bigger presence than I would have contrived for him as a counterpoint. He is competing for the spotlight against all my intentions for him. For some reason, I can imagine him more vividly than I can my main character. He was alive from the beginning, and she presented as passive: I could hardly get her out of bed. So even when a writer has intentions for a character, sometimes the characters don‘t cooperate. They insist on their own kind of life in the story. To the writer, they are people, neither flat nor round, but every one of them alive, even if their role is small. So it‘s not much good teaching a writer about round and flat characters. My girl won‘t get out of bed and my boy picks up the slack. That‘s the kind of people they are.

<16> But I must be careful about this. Do I really have that sense of writing about real people? Sometimes I do want to shake my characters and demand of them: What do you want! When I think I know what they want and try to write that in, or think I‘m writing it in, either they resist or I somehow don‘t write it in after all, though I intended to and even thought I was. The temptation now is to get psychological and ask how it can be that I let my own creations resist me. What‘s going on there? Why don‘t I have control over my own process? Am I somehow separating myself into two distinct and autonomous selves? Are writers suffering from multiple personality disorder? I think not. It doesn‘t feel like that. It feels more like a waking dream that I‘m struggling to record.

<17> But I realize I have only been considering character in the moment. As the moment unfolds how is character revealed? What about the overall pattern that makes up character? Is it a collage of images? Is it an accumulated history of actions, emotions, and thoughts? And as history relates to time, is the making of character the making of a timeline that has forward momentum? That creates a continuum? Or is it more like a pointillist painting or a pixilated screen image where the dots, each in themselves relatively meaningless, together shape something that appears to have solid form? The very cells in the human body are each invisible until many together form a person who is visible to the world. So what does all this mean to desire? Desire is not static. Desire reacts to the changing environment. Desire assesses when it is closer or farther from the object of desire and adjusts impulses toward emotion, thought and action. I have been thinking about restraint in character creation. My inclination is to throw restraint out the window and let some passion into the writing, some unabashed feeling. We are so regulated in life. Can we not be exuberant in art, the very site that is supposed to be so liberated?

<18> I think characters don‘t want one thing. I think like humans they want many things, all conflicting and changing and morphing into other things. So can a writer really address them all at once? Of course not. But a writer must not oversimplify either. The writer must allow the inconsistencies, the sidetracks of desire. The editor may come along and prune to select for story, bring into relief and let the rest go for another story. But the writer must not inhibit character desire. What if my protagonist has a fantasy of being eaten by a bear that is somewhat erotic? I‘m inclined to be embarrassed writing about this, allowing a young girl to have a fantasy that borders on ghoulish fetish. But, I believe the patterns in the story will, in the end, warrant this unusual scene and it will make perfect and valuable sense in context. Character desire is messy and complicated, likely to change without warning despite the writer‘s own intentions. Desire often brings up taboos from the unconscious. Characters and their desires come from outside us or deep within us, for if the infinite is within us as God is said to dwell in us, then from without or within is all one. So perhaps that source, that place where I feel like I go to get characters and stories from is of a finer substance than our coarse corporeal bodies and exists as a kind of paper grain onto which we are layered, a kind of 3D background into which we are super-entangled. It is outside and inside. It is everything and everywhere, a unified enmesh.

<19> Desire is character, perhaps. Even if a character is passive, they are still acting out a desire, which is to be passive. The general advice to fiction writers is to know what the character wants. I know what I want. I want to write deep complex memorable characters whoyou might recognize on the street, who you empathize with, who you think about long after the story is done, who are still out there somewhere living life and you almost wonder what they‘re doing now, like old friends you‘ve lost touch with over time. I want to write characters who ennoble and inspire, not in a lofty way but in an identifiable, attainable way. I am thinking of that boy who wanted what all children want: to have pride in his father and align with him. In the end, he betrays the father and leaves him. So it‘s an act of courage that shows the boy‘s inner strength and moral fiber surpassing his own bad blood and poor roots. Such a boy might be out there now, a man knowing by his good nature what is the right thing to do while the rest of us are somewhat corrupt and no matter how good our intentions, we make awful mistakes and missteps, and we hurt and damage before we realize it because our natures are more self-interested.

<20> Are my characters made to fit the story or the other way around? How do I write a story anyway? I start with a feeling and a sentence with an image. Let me see what I‘ve been doing. I start with an image, it seems. Then the image suggests a feeling and the feeling suggests a desire. I looked at some old stories and didn‘t see much to speak of in character development. I used to use a lot more dialogue and I used to be so literal—never put any internal life into the stories, or not much. Nothing surprising or reaching beyond the boundaries of the ordinary. So now I am pushing harder for original thought, for something beyond the artificial exterior. I seem to be pushing into the realm of metaphoric life where some truth might actually reside.

<21> I was thinking about how this idea of having to know what your character wants is true, but I thought it meant you have to know before you write about it. It may be more accurate to reflect on this knowing as an act of empathy, that as you are writing your heart goes out to the character and everything that comes out of the pen is charged with that empathy. The landscape, the rhythm, tone, and such are written in sympathy with the character. It is when the character is not emitting some kind of emotion that the writing becomes mechanical and forced. I have found that it is when I feel emotionally cut off from the character that I have difficulty writing a convincing scene, or one that contains anything that feels true.

<22> Have my thoughts on character changed since I wrote another chapter? How did I deepen my protagonist‘s character? How did I explore/expose her desire? Or create her desire? I let things be messy and not make sense. I allowed for complexity and paradox and confliction. I played off the perceptions of other characters. I put myself in the mix, thinking what I might feel, think and do in that situation. It unfolded naturally as I wrote, and it seemed like the scenes were writing themselves because each moment came into being as a consequence of the last. Each section of a scene seemed to have its own arc and momentum, and when that came to an end, there was a natural and spontaneous transition to the next situation in the chapter or story. Is it musical cadence, that moment of arc completion and transition? Is it tension or pace or mood? Is it a logical winding down of events began and finished? Is it setup and punchline, point made? The thing I‘m getting to, I guess, is . . . I thought this advice was right about having to know what the character wants because I thought I knew less than other writers. Then when I began to think for myself about the question and my own experience of writing characters with desires in fiction, I thought it was wrong because I felt that my character was coming from somewhere I had no control over, the infinite source from either inside or outside, and all one has to do to write the truth is get out of the way and let it flow without impediment. Then I thought it must be right again because you can know what your character desires, not mind-knowing so much as heart-knowing—knowing at the level of empathy as you write.

<23> Some writers say they are masters of their characters and if they want their characters to cross the road, they will make them cross the road. But other writers claim to chase after their characters recording what they do—if they can keep up. So what‘s going on here? Two completely opposite authorial relationships with characters. What is my experience? Is there room in this discussion for ambiguity and uncertainty about my relationship with my characters?

<24> I cannot answer the question of whether or not writers control character desire. I can only address how character desire can be shown in the story, which may have something to do with craft—although I don‘t believe a writer can deliberately employ “craft” while writing the first draft, if they are writing something honest. So I cannot really address that after all. I find it hard to analyze my relationship with my characters after the fact.

<25> Maybe the thing to do now is look at the tenderness I feel toward my boy character who has been invented to die but I can‘t help but feel like he‘s a real person who‘s doomed and so through him I link human mortality with his absurdist relationship with “the creator” who is me. He exists because I relate to him. My mind is haunted by the scene I wrote where my boy character is being honeyed and feathered by his fellow crewmen after his small treachery is exposed, and I know what‘s happening to him in that moment but he doesn‘t, and I have the feeling I‘m recording his uncertainty but I‘m also orchestrating his uncertainty, aware of his anguish, aware of my sympathetic response as reader and at the same time aware of my authority as writer to affect reader sympathy by making my character think and act in a certain way. I‘m directing an actor for an audience, but I‘m also the audience and the actor. I wonder if the only difference between writing and madness is that the writer can regroup when she has to function in the material world, whereas the madman‘s edges remain compromised and fragmented. What does this say about character and desire? Perhaps desire is the bonding agent between author, character, and reader. Desire is what we all understand together. Or what we‘re trying to understand together because desire is a fluid thing, open to questioning and revision at any time, open to paradox and ambiguity, contradiction, complexity, opacity. We must be open, as writers and readers, to enlargement as opposed to reduction. An engaging character is one who challenges the reader to imbue the character with some of their own energy in trying to understand the character, in saying, if I were that character, this is why I might have acted that way. That is the hook, when a reader invests some of herself in the character. Then the stakes are personal.

<26> As for minor characters, supporting characters, “flat characters,” I say that no matter how brief the appearance, all characters are people. But how to make the reader believe in the character? Is that where desire comes in? And is the writer‘s challenge to make even a brief appearance not memorable and not even real, but believable? Today I saw a bit of graffiti on a brick wall, a painted banana with the words: “This is not a banana.” It was a poorly rendered banana and the statement was supposed to be ironic because it was meant to reference the idea that the image is not the thing but an image of the thing. The irony did not succeed, however, because it was so painfully obvious that the poor image was not a banana. So, perhaps that is the writer‘s job, to make the image represent the thing so convincingly that the reader cannot, or does not, have the will to argue with it. Once you have the reader in a state of acceptance, you can take her into more abstract realms.

<27> Does desire play a role in that? I read of a character who dresses well only from the waist up. From this, the reader is engaged to understand why, and it is the man‘s belief in his own presence that we apprehend from this brief description. So we are given an image, and the image suggests a belief in itself, an inner life that animates it. When exterior image suggests an inner life . . . is that kind of desire more real than telling readers what the character desires? Show, don‘t tell, verisimilitude, and all that? In my experience, I know my characters‘ larger outcome, but in the details, I feel like I‘m recording them. I‘m aware of moving my characters toward their destinies, but in the details I feel like I‘m chasing them. It‘s that my imagination is in motion. Emotion . . . the root of this word is “to move.” Perhaps there‘s something there. Desire, the emotion, sets the character in motion. Even passivity is a kind of motion, an act of passivity. An image in motion presupposes an inner life that animates the image. Hence, the image of a character is transformed into a living person as perceived by writer and reader. One cannot make generalizations or value judgments about characters being flat or round or real or false or significant or insignificant. I believe characters are in the service of the novel and their value is a matter of context within the framework of the novel being itself. If the novel is not working, it may be due to the argument of character being weak. They have not convinced the reader of their necessity, their importance, their inner life.

<28> So what can I say about character? It‘s hard to generalize because everything is in context, case by case. Any rule one could name is subject to being proven wrong in another context. Do I really believe that there are no general rules about character, but that their success as characters is a matter of how well they function in the novel? What about desire? Is it true that you have to know what the character wants? Does my sympathy and tenderness toward my boy character, who feels to me like a real person being manipulated by God or fate, have anything to do with desire? I do not know. I am a character in an essay, wanting to know.

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